I am currently on track to graduate with a degree in Materials Science and NanoE. However, I did an externship at a company devoted to Material Science and 1) they’re online application called for only ChemEs and 2) they people there said they knew of maybe 4 MatSci majors in the plant and they worked in corrosion.
I took on MatSci and NanoE because I wanted to work with a lot of different materials and not so much on reactors. But I understand I would eventually prefer to work in engineering management.
That’s why when I went there and employees mentioned MechEs and ChemEs often have a lot of overlap in work and they said “you really learn everything you need to know on the job” I started to ask the question: what’s the real purpose of an engineering degree?
Is is just a barrier of entry? I’m afraid I’m missing out on engineering principles and boxing myself in with a MatSci/NanoE degree. I understand working in business/management doesn’t require an engineering degree but at the same time I still would like to work for an engineering company as an engineer just to see if I like it.
Finally, I want to figure out whether I should switch to ChemE instead and take their specialization in MatSci. It would be a bit of a stretch schedule wise and it might wear me out but what’s 2 years in the scheme of 40+? Any job I have found that my degree qualifies me for is because it has engineering in the name and not because it’s in MatSci. I want to work with a wide range of materials (polymers, biomaterials, etc.) and I’m trying to figure out which degree would let me do that?
The primary purpose of an engineering degree is to provide you with the foundation of knowledge necessary to quickly and (relatively) easily learn more complex engineering tasks. There are relatively few jobs out there that you can perform with just the knowledge obtained under the degree, but at the same time there are even fewer jobs that can accommodate you having to take 4x as long to come up to speed because you don’t know what s-parameters are*.
Seriously, they are going to train you on the job, but that training is predicated on you already knowing a whole bunch of relevant terminology and methods that are the core of the engineering degree. Depending on the job, you can sometimes get this base knowledge in a hard science degree but no employer is going to want to take an accounting major and train them to do antenna design**.
A little bit, yes. The job of engineering is not that far off from the study of engineering, so if you can complete an engineering degree with a decent GPA then it is a pretty good indicator that you can work as an engineer. But honestly, it’s mostly the knowledge. Few companies want to teach calculus to their employees.
I would be wary of that statement. There are a lots of different management and business roles, and many are hard to get into without a technical degree and experience. If you want to work in logistics or marketing or finance, an engineering degree is no real help and may be a hindrance (since you never learned the fundamentals of those fields). If you want to work in program management or be a functional manager of an engineering department, then you better have some engineering credentials. I work for a very large manufacturing company, and my entire management chain, from immediate manager to CEO, all have engineering degrees and experience. And that has held true for a decade of management changes!
Balancing where you are versus where you want to be is always challenging. I can’t advise you on MatSci vs ChemE (not my fields!), but I can give you some ideas about management tracks and education. Your current “easy”*** path to management is to work as an engineer for some years (probably 4 or more) and then start shifting into technical management roles - you can take that path with little or no supplementary education. If you want to go into more traditional business/management roles then it is likely you will need something like an MBA, but you need to be careful there because getting an MBA too early can make it very hard to continue or advance in an engineering career!
*: That was an EE example.
*: So was that.
***: Management is not an easy thing to get, nor to keep. *
Cosmicfish gave you a very complete answer but I’d like to reinforce/add a couple of points.
- 90% of the knowledge I have to do my engineering job I learned on the job. However, that 10% I learned in college was a necessary prerequisite to learning the 90%. Engineering knowledge builds on prior knowledge. You do need that college degree.
- One of the biggest things you learn in college is how to think as an engineer. How to sort thru data, various requirements, etc. and come up with a design that meets those requirements.
- You also learn how to learn.
- Don't confuse your college major with your career "major". Since you learn so much on the job, you can take your knowledge that you learned in college and apply it to many fields once out in the real world. Usually they are somewhat close. For example, I was a civil engineering major with a specialty in structures in college. I never worked in CE. I went to work in the aerospace world doing structural analysis (yes, not much of a stretch but still fairly different in approach, the rigidity of the CE codes vs. the free form of space structures) but I also branched into materials engineering as I needed to use some fairly exotic materials to get the properties and functionality I needed..
Industrial engineering could be applicable to logistics and finance, though other types of engineering would not be of specific help (although they could sometimes be seen as indicators of quantitative skill that is sometimes looked for).
Most engineers won’t apply all of their coursework, especially if they don’t go to grad school. But engineering students learn general problem solving techniques. And the learn how to teach themselves new material. Many also use some of the classes… but hard to predict ahead of time which ones.
The bottom line though is that you have to get through all the Engineering coursework to be considered for an Engineering job.
I was going to provide some input here, but it seems that everyone has pretty much covered the practical value of en engineering degree. The only reason left - you can scoff at the “mere mortals” with a degree from any other discipline 